… because I quit my job at the call centre today.

The reasons I gave the agency – that aside from the tedium of the work itself, I hate the hours, the pay and most especially the commute – were only half the story.  There’s also the tension of working each day without ever knowing whether you’ll be working the next or not.  On several occasions in the few months I’ve been there, colleagues have disappeared over night simply because, as text-message interrogations have revealed, they were deemed surplus to requirements.

Such is the lot of the agency worker (despite the the trade union bureaucracy’s support of our cause in its bathetically vain quest to find a pro-working-class policy significant enough to get Labour re-elected but insignificant enough that Labour would be willing to implement it), and it’s a big deal.  “I’m gonna be next,” I always tell my friends as I get to the pub just before closing time, “I’ll probably be fired tomorrow”.   I never am fired, funnily enough, and that’s why I’ve had to take matters into my own hands; I can’t be doing with the doubt any more.  In the good times a bit of uncertainty makes life more interesting, but in times like these it quickly gets to be too much permanent crisis.

It’s more than that, though.  In the job I had before this, we were directly employed by the company, and were also in a sector less subject to wild swings in demand for our services.  We could expect a standard notice period if it ever did come to redundancies, and we could also reasonably expect it not to come to that.  It never really needed to, though.  I worked in each call centre for just a few short months, and in each case I was among the last of my new intake batch to leave.  Everybody leaves; turnover is incredibly high in England as in India:

A 23-year-old man, barely out of college, has been recovering from a heart attack in hospital. The doctor’s diagnosis: modern lifestyle – stress and odd hours of work.

He works at a call centre in Mumbai

Alarmed?

His colleagues at the call centre where he works are. Says one of his best friends and colleague: “I’m leaving. Have been planning to for sometime.  As soon as I get another job, even if it’s less paying, I will leave this industry for good.”

My Doctor, last I saw him, concurred.  It is a stressful line of work and, especially as the cold weather sets in, this can visibly affect your health (plus this one time, after a stupidly long shift, I got an RSI).  I say all this not by way of a whine – I’ve done more than enough of that over the course of my employment, as my long-suffering flatmates will testify – but because, when you think about it, it really shouldn’t be.  You spend the day sitting at a computer and answering the phone.  Call-centres are the mills of the 21st century, yes, but you can at least sort of comprehend how a damp and noisy hellhole of limb-mangling nineteenth-century robots might be a stressful place to work.  But a desk, a computer and a phone?  That’s the kind of environment where I spend half my leisure time anyway.

There’s a number of ways the stress is brought in.  The targets.  The fact of constantly being monitored.  The arbitrary scripts, which we hate as much as you do, believe me.  I’m sure that accross the industry companies pit one branch against the other, but the company for whom we work for pits different departments against each other.  Literally, the most hated rivals of the Company X sales team are the Company X customer services department.  The more orderly of my ex-employers carefully atomised their workforce, putting us in little individual booths with strictly individualised breaktimes, the more anarchic one generally didn’t do breaktimes at all; its stressful specialty was micromanaging our adherence to procedures that they knew were literally impossible to follow.

Now it’s obvious that some of these measures, harsh as they are when you think of workers as human beings, are in place just to make us more productive cogs in a more productive machine; the toll it takes upon us is just collateral.  Some of the things that cause us the most stress, though, are quite obviously counterproductive.  Just how much profit do we make throwing bewildered customers between departments that have no idea what each other actually do, for example?  Not to mention the huge chunk of income that’s lost when a client dumps us because of contradictory procedures leading to a data protection scandal.  And what you have to remember is that a capitalist’s job isn’t just to generate income, it’s to expropriate income.  Income that goes into profits counts; income that goes into wages counts as a cost.

Better for the company to take £5 of which 90% goes to shareholders than £10 of which they only get to keep 40%.  Keeping the workers down is profitable, and the associated overheads and minor catastrophes are deemed an acceptable cost.  The high turnover, for example, pushes training and supervision costs way up, but it also means that no-one’s really comparing wages to inflation.

In this sense call centre work dramatically increases class consciousness (I particularly like the fact that as far as customers are concerned I’m probably in Bangalore hamming up the Northern accent; I really am part of a global working class), but it’s also the scene of some very deliberate blurring of class lines.  Devolution of management, I’m sure they call it; basically, if you can hold on for a year without a nervous breakdown, you’re almost by default a supervisor, or a line manager or (God help us) a “team coach”.  Management shows its face on the shop floor – and absorbs complaints and abuse from staff and customers – mainly through proxies who are young, anxious to escape, and perenially strapped the cash.  Not that there haven’t been a minority of obnoxious characters too, but most of my immediate superiors at work have been in more or less the exact same circumstances as myself.

The one other thing to say is that, unsurprisingly, this is a large and growing sector (“we actually do quite well out of a recession,” said the smug sales manager who interviewed me, “because companies have to work that much harder at selling things”) in which the unions have almost no toehold.  And, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to hear, it’s never easy to unionise from scratch.  My attempts to build a Unite branch in my last workplace got me fired (for “bringing the company into disrepute“, you understand, it’s not like they had a problem with union organisation, how could you even think anything so hurtful?), and not entirely because of my own elementary strategic mistakes (not least of which was not really having a strategy.  Still, my long suspension with full pay was a bit of a golden ticket, and the thing that allowed me to become politically active for the first time).

With the atomisation, the precarity, the turnover and the lack of any radical tradition you could be forgiven for thinking it couldn’t be done.  Forgiven, and then promptly rebuked.  In 1887, the teenaged matchgirls of London probably would have seemed impossible to unionise.  Looking at my prospects the only thing to look forward too at the end of another stressful dole-holiday is another call-centre, so I have a personal stake in hoping for an upsurge in fighting phone agents; still, while I can appreciate the focus of the left on those “more advanced” sectors of the working class that do have a clear potential to strike (a major victory for the teachers or the bus drivers against the pay freeze, in particular, would be a major victory for us all) there are worse ideas than a Socialist Worker industrial sale outside a call centre.